I'm ready to be a real-life grannie, says Raquel

It is hard to imagine the Sixties starlet who shot to fame in a skimpy fur bikini playing the doting grandmother.

But Raquel Welch has decided it is time to take on a less glamorous role.

The four-times-married actress - who once upstaged her daughter-inlaw at her son's wedding - is piling the pressure on her two adult children to make her a grandmother.

'I am playing grandmothers in movies now. I'd like to be one for real, but my kids are not co-operating with me,' she said. Her son Damon, 40, married Freddie Trueman's daughter Rebecca in 1990, with Miss Welch wearing a famously low-cut dress.

When the marriage ended within a year, Miss Trueman announced: 'The only thing we had in common was that we were both the child of a famous parent.'

Miss Welch, 60, also has a 37-year-old daughter Tahnee, an actress, from her first marriage to Jack Welch.

The star, who shot to fame more than 30 years ago in the film One Million Years BC, married her fourth husband, restaurateur Richard Palmer, 45, in 1999.

She said: 'I was very reluctant to marry again, especially after I found out he was quite a bit younger.

'I couldn't see the reason, because if you're not going to have children, why bother? But Richie is very funny, a hard-working guy who gets a kick out of life. And so do I.' Miss Welch says she copes with growing older by poking fun at the notion of sex symbols.

She told the New York Post : 'Every time I have a birthday, every disc jockey in Hollywood starts yahooing it all over the place.

'But if you can't have fun as an ageing sex symbol when you hit 60, I don't know what will become of you.'

Her latest film, Tortilla Soup, opens in America this week. She also stars in a new television series called American Family.